Saint's Day

The canonisation of Saint Jo Cox appears to be complete. Not content with St Andrew’s Day, St David’s Day and the splendidly screwy St Paddy’s Day a new national day has been declared by people so determined to harvest every scrap of political capital they can wring from the increasingly frayed damp rag that is Brendan Cox’s public grief. They are proposing street parties to celebrate the diversity that she so heartily welcomed. I’ve heard of rubbing the right’s nose in it but isn’t this rather shoving everybody’s schnozz full of bullshit and sticking two fingers up to all who voted the other way?

Wait a minute though; street parties? Celebration? What is there to celebrate? Her side lost and badly so, because she represented much that has gone wrong in the west in recent decades. If anything Jo Cox Day should be adopted, Guy Fawkes-style, as a symbol of all we rejected. If she were alive today she would be vocal in resistance to the notion of making St George’s Day a public holiday in England, a recognition which some have campaigned for years to bring about. Jo Cox was no saint.

In fact, before her unnecessary – although some might say timely – murder (for, let’s not pretend it wasn’t a genuine horror) she was relatively unknown outside the Labour activist circle. Their brand of vibrant, multicultural insanity was part of what we voted to reject and even the national outrage at the event did not sway the ballot no matter how hard it was milked and how much we were publicly denounced for supposedly enabling her killer. Her real significance was minor and this prolonging of the agony is last gasp opportunism for those who refuse to face reality.

Although I, like many others, was not particularly moved by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales the country practically lost its mind when she died. The national and very public outpouring of genuine grief was marked by a profound absence of stoic British dignity and a descent into a maudlin fascination with other people’s private loss. But even after that sea of floral tributes, that public display of hurt, the demand for answers and the profound if short-lived slump in support for the Queen, which Blair and cronies exploited with ill-concealed glee, there is still no formal annual remembrance, even though she had the decency to pop her clogs on a Bank Holiday.

Compare and contrast...

Call me callous, but long after the strident attempts to revive a memory most of us have already filed under ‘who cares’ there is one event which will be a real cause for continued and genuine celebration. Forget calls for Diana Day, Stephen Lawrence Day, Madeleine McCann Day and Doris Day. Instead, if you really want to stir up sentiment, if you really want to rub some people’s noses in it and if you want to annually remind people of the national insanity we narrowly avoided, if you really want an annual celebration in June, then raise a glass to Brexit Day.

Capital

As expected the media is awash with reports, blogs and columns purporting to pin the killing of Jo Cox firmly on Nigel Farage's political career. Polly Toynbee in particular is so convinced that Ukip and its sympathisers are nothing short of Nazis in corduroy that she has trotted out her usual line on bigotry. Typically, she can't (or won't) bring herself to confront the truths of human nature, preferring to promulgate the pitifully transparent lie that the nasty people are on the right and her people are blameless.

The statement put out by Brendan Cox very soon after Jo's death also strikes a mood of conflict between the values she stood for and the assumed motivation of the killer. Not only should he have not been pressed to make such a declaration so soon afterwards, it is a bold assumption based on conflicting accounts of what actually happened. The presumption of this being a hate crime is very much from the Toynbee rule book.

Thomas Mair, the shooter, appears to have a long history of mental illness and detachment from society. His politics, it is said, are unknown and he seems to have no history of activism. A random act? A planned assassination? An intended confrontation gone wrong? A case of wrong place, wrong time? At the time of writing, none of this is know, but Toynbee knows. She also knows that in the world of making political capital you strike while the iron is hot. Brendan O'Neill's condemnation of such action clearly failed to reach her. To save you reading her hateful article I have paraphrased it here:

Meanwhile post-vigil (every death has to have a public vigil nowadays) people are tentatively returning to the referendum campaign trail and carefully choosing their words. Some are less sober in their condemnation of Leave supporters and are determined to use Jo Cox as an emblem of Little England divisiveness, gleefully seeing this as a turning point in the recent decline of the Remain vote. I hope it changes nothing and that people stick to their guns, because were the possibility of freeing a whole nation from its chains to turn on the exploitation of sentiment following the death of a single individual that would be tragedy on a wholly different scale.